


Loving One More

by theramblinrose



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Caryl, F/M, based on love child, can be read separately
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:48:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26803144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theramblinrose/pseuds/theramblinrose
Summary: Caryl, AU, One shot.  Based on the Love Child universe, but can be read alone.  It wasn’t about loving someone more than Sophia, it was about simply loving “one more.”  They wanted to adopt June, and they welcomed the knowledge that Sophia would never deny another child her parents’ warm love and affection.
Relationships: Daryl Dixon/Carol Peletier
Kudos: 12





	Loving One More

AN: This is just a little one shot from the “Love Child” universe. 

I originally had it published in a collection, but most people never really knew about the collection, and I’ve decided to do away with it.

I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think! 

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Daryl pulled his hand out of his glove, leaving the glove tucked in the space he created between his arm and his side, and shook it.

Over the years one thing was for certain. Sophia could throw a ball as well as anybody ever could. She’d leave his hand stinging, even through the glove, more often than he might have liked to admit. And she could catch too. Every now and again, just to test her, he’d thrown back with more force than he really thought was acceptable—giving her as good as she gave—and she never complained. 

Every Sunday they did the same thing. Each Sunday looked exactly like the one before. After church, they had lunch. After lunch, Daryl and Sophia took to the yard and they threw the ball back and forth.

There were often things that needed to be done. There was work around the house that Daryl always had to get done on the weekends because there was no other time to do it. It didn’t matter, though, what had to be done. It was always put aside until they’d thrown the ball back and forth—ball and gloves alike worn by time and use at this point—for at least an hour. 

Sometimes they talked, other times they didn’t, but that one thing remained constant.

Sophia was already packing up her stuff, though. Soon she’d be going to college. Every time Daryl even thought of it, he very nearly choked himself with the knot that inexplicably rose up in his throat. 

She would drive herself. She’d likely be the only young lady there that would drive herself to college. There’d certainly been a good deal of confusion when they’d requested parking for her in one of the garages. They’d tried to issue her some sort of temporary parking, assuming that they were confused about where she’d be leaving her car while Daryl, without a doubt, unloaded her things for her, but they’d finally gotten it straightened out that she’d be driving herself.

She’d drive herself, in her own car that Alice and Melodye had chipped in to help Daryl and Carol buy for her, so that she could come and go as she pleased.

Sophia was independent. They’d made sure of that. If nothing else, she was independent.

But she was a lot of other things as well.

Still, Daryl and Carol both had wanted her to know that she always had them. No matter what, they would always be there for her—but they wanted her to know that she had herself too. She never needed to feel that she couldn’t be herself, and that she couldn’t go her own way, just because she might have to go it alone.

Watching her go out that door, though? Even if she promised to only be gone for the week and come back for the weekend—as she insisted she’d do and maybe would for the first little while—was going to be hard. 

And it was going to be hard, too, because Daryl knew that once she was out there—once she got a taste of what it felt like to be free and to be Sophia when there was no one around watching her—she was going to love it. The first Sunday without pitching the ball back and forth was going to be the longest Sunday ever. He already knew that.

Today they might have talked about her leaving—again. Today they might have covered, once more, the checklists that Daryl had made for her and repeated to her every week for two months. But that wasn’t what Daryl had in mind.

So, glove in hand, he waved her over. She came, wide smile on her face, eyes glittering.

“Too much for you?” She teased.

Daryl chuckled and nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “Always too much.”

He gestured toward the porch and she instinctively went over to sit down. It was “time out”. It was time to sit a moment, enjoy the sun—or the rain of that were the case because not even the weather kept them from their Sunday ballgame—and it was time for Daryl to smoke a cigarette that he’d later drop in the ashtray Carol conveniently placed there for him to keep the area clean while, more often than not, Sophia entertained him with some piece of her life.

Except today it was Daryl who wanted to talk.

“Sit, Soph,” Daryl said. 

She did, though she did cock an eyebrow at him for commanding her, accidentally, a little more like a dog than his daughter. He smirked at her in response because it was all that he had to answer for the slip.

“We’re going to pick her up,” he said. “Tomorrow.” 

Sophia hummed and watched him, her elbows on her knees, as he lit a cigarette. There was no need to clarify what he was talking about. She knew it perfectly well. It was the only thing, besides her impending departure, that the house was filled with.

“How you feel about it?” Daryl asked.

Sophia shrugged.

“Same way I felt about it the last time you asked me,” she responded. “Honestly, Daddy, I’m not nearly as inclined to change my mind as Merle might have you believe.” 

Daryl chuckled to himself.

Though he might believe that it was important this daughter be independent and his wife be more than allowed to speak her mind around his home—her opinion on very nearly everything sought out by him before he made a concrete decision—his brother wasn’t quite of the same mind. Merle believed, though Andrea was the only woman with which he spent any substantial amount of time and she never seemed as guilty of the sins he put on her as he said she was—that women shouldn’t be asked anything because they never knew for sure what they felt or thought. 

Thursday’s conviction was Friday’s doubt and Saturday’s denial. That was Merle’s motto.

“I know you didn’t change your mind,” Daryl said. “But—Soph—I just want to be sure you’ve thought it all out. I mean…you know your Ma and me, we love you. We always will. But—it’s a big thing bringing another kid into the house. And this one? She ain’t but four years old. It’s going to be a lot of work on your Ma. We’re gonna be busy with her…”

“You think I’m going to be jealous?” Sophia asked, raising her eyebrow at him in question. 

Daryl chewed at his lip and took a drag off his cigarette to keep from having to respond. He wasn’t entirely sure what he thought. To be honest, Merle was probably entirely backwards in his thinking because Daryl often felt it was Sophia and Carol that were the most set in what they believed to be true. Daryl was the one that felt, more often than not, that he could swing back and forth if given the chance. 

Honestly? He appreciated having Carol tell him, quite often, which way he should go on one thing or another.

“She’s gonna be around a lot longer before she leaves and goes off to school,” Daryl said. “We’re gonna have a lot more time with her than we’ve had with you, Soph. I just—I don’t want you to think that means we love her any more or you any less. Ya know? ‘Cause it ain’t the case. I don’t think…”

He paused and shook his head at her.

“I don’t think that I could love nobody more’n I do you,” Daryl said. “And I know your Ma couldn’t.” 

Sophia offered him a soft smile.

“Daddy—it’s not about loving more,” Sophia said. “It’s just about loving—one more. Or two more, even. If you want to. If you can.” 

“If we coulda,” Daryl started. He never got to finish, though, because Sophia cut him off. She didn’t want him to finish. He knew she didn’t want him to finish because, as far as he could recall, he’d only ever expressed the sentiment that she knew was coming once in its entirety. After the one time, she’d cut him off every time he’d started.

“You and Mama would’ve raised me from the time I was born,” Sophia said. “And I know that. Sometimes—when I’m alone and I can’t sleep? Sometimes I like to think what it’d been like. I like to think how we’d have been back then. When I was little?”

Daryl swallowed at the lump in his throat.

“You ain’t the only one,” he said.

And she wasn’t. Sometimes, when they were alone, Daryl and Carol liked to share “stories” with each other. They were more or less fantasies, fairy tales they told each other, of what it would have been like if Sophia had been with them all along. They talked about who would have fed her at what hours of the night. They talked about first bikes and pony rides and trips to the coast to watch her tiny little toddler feet make their first prints in the sand. 

They were all fantasies and no more real than any movie made, but they were important to them. It was the only way, sometimes, that they could get over the disappointment that they felt of not having had that time with her. It was time lost. It was the most precious thing in the world and it was something that they’d never get back.

Her childhood, spent lonely and alone in an orphanage not thirteen miles away from them, was the greatest injustice that Daryl felt he could ever do to anyone in his life—and he often felt responsible for it. 

“She’s four years old,” he said. “If I’da known…you woulda been that age, Soph.” 

Sophia had finally come out and said it on her last birthday. They’d noticed, as they always did on her birthday celebrations, that there was a sadness that seemed to wrap around the girl when she blew out her candle. It was the kind of sadness, on her face, that they both felt when they talked about how all those years with her were gone, never to be seen again. 

And finally, they’d asked her what it was that caused the sadness. They’d asked her what they could do—if there was anything that could be done—to help with taking it away.

And her answer had surprised them more than anything ever could. Because both of them, honestly, had expected her to express some profound feeling of loss for those very same years they mourned. They’d expected it to be something they’d all mourn together but never be able to fix. They’d thought it would be something very personal to her. 

And it was personal, but not just to her. 

She told them that she was sad because, every time she blew out the candle, she hoped for them that they would have a child. She wanted it for them. She wanted, oddly enough, not to mourn the time that she didn’t spend with them in her own childhood, but rather to see someone else get to spend their whole lives between them as their parents. 

Right away, they’d let that be the answer that they needed to their own questions about what, if anything, they’d do to grow their family. And since, for whatever reason, God hadn’t seen fit to bless them with a child of their own, they’d put in the paperwork to bring home another from the very same home they’d found Sophia in. 

Now their request had been granted. She was four years old. Her name was June and she’d be coming to join them just in time to see Sophia off to school.

But the age of the young girl just served to remind Daryl that, if he’d really looked into things the way he should have when he’d met Carol, he might have brought Sophia home when she was only four. 

“That’s why we’ve gotta go and get her,” Sophia said. “She’s four now. We don’t want her waiting another few years. It’s better to bring her home now.” 

Daryl chuckled.

“She’s not ours yet,” he said. “We don’t gotta go get her.” 

Sophia hummed.

“She’s ours,” Sophia said. “She’s just waiting.” 

Daryl shook his head. 

“You’re somethin’ else,” he commented. 

Sophia smiled, wagging her eyebrows at him.

“Like Mama?” She asked.

Daryl smiled then. Sophia always loved it when he compared her to Carol. The two, even if they’d spent so much of Sophia’s life apart, were cut from the same cloth. In that case there was much, in his opinion, to be said for biology, even if otherwise they’d determined that it didn’t matter one little bit.

“Just like her,” Daryl said. 

Sophia stood up from her position on the porch and slipped her hand back into her glove. 

“You think June will like the glove I got her?” Sophia asked.

“Yeah,” Daryl said. “I do.” 

“You’ll teach her to catch, right?” Sophia asked. “Play on Sundays?” 

Daryl nodded at her, knowing full well what she was doing. 

“What about you?” He asked. 

She smiled at him. 

“I can already catch,” she said. “Throw too.” 

“What about Sundays?” Daryl asked.

“I can catch then too,” Sophia said, raising her eyebrows at him. “My Daddy taught me. Come on—let’s go another round. Unless you’re too tired?” 

“Never for you, Soph,” Daryl said, getting to his feet to trail after her to the places in the yard where, as Carol pointed out, the grass didn’t grow for being worn down so often by the same pairs of shoes.

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AN: I hope you enjoyed! Let me know what you think!


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